"It's fascinating that we continue to be surprised by what we discover about the characteristics and properties of exoplanetary systems. It's quite difficult to explain the formation of a massive, solid exoplanet, but it's existence gives us an additional constraint that we will need to apply to theories of planet formation." Dr Ken Rice, Institute for Astronomy

HARPS-North

The HARPS-N spectrograph (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher-North) was built at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh and the Geneva Observatory. It began operation in the Canary Islands in 2012, and is the northern counterpart of HARPS in the Chilean Andes.

Image gallery

The newly discovered "mega-Earth" Kepler-10c dominates the foreground in this artist's conception. Its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background. Both orbit a sunlike star. Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. Therefore it is all solids, although it may possess a thin atmosphere shown here as wispy clouds. Image: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

The University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number
SC005336, VAT Registration Number GB 592 9507 00, and is acknowledged by the UK authorities as a
“Recognised body” which has been
granted degree awarding powers.